Man Booker rule change has lost us sales, say publishers

US dominance has hit Commonwealth writers who are falling off shortlists

PUBLISHERS have turned on the organisers of the Man Booker prize, warning that a decision to include American authors has harmed sales of books.

Since the rule change in 2014, the award has twice gone to a US author, prompting concerns that the prize had become less diverse as writers from the UK and the Commonwealth were being overshadowed.

About 30 publishers are understood to have signed a letter urging the trustees of the Booker Prize Foundation to reverse the decision, saying the change risked creating “a homogenised literary future” dominated by American culture.

“The rule change, which presumably had the intention of making the prize more global, has in fact made it less so by allowing the dominance of Anglo-american writers at the expense of others; it risks turning the prize, once a brilliant mechanism for bringing the world’s English-language writers to the attention of the world’s biggest English-language market, into one that is no longer serving the readers in that market,” it says.

It claims the diversity of the prize has been “significantly reduced”, noting that this year’s shortlist consists of three Americans, two Britons and one Britishpakistani as opposed to 2013’s shortlist, which features a New Zealander, a Zimbabwean, an Irishman, an American-canadian, a Briton and a British-american.

“We already live in a world that is dominated by American culture,” the letter says.

“The Man Booker Prize was one significant way to allow other voices to be heard.”

The letter states that, with the exception of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the sales uplift in the US for winners not based in America “dwarfs” that for winners based in the US.

It claims that the rule change is not even popular in America, where Ron Charles, a book critic, wrote in the Washington Post that “the Americanisation of the Booker Prize is a lost opportunity to learn about great books that haven’t already been widely heralded”.

Jonny Geller, of the Curtis Brown literary agency, said the letter was “a long time coming” and that “widening the entry requirements to include US writers has resulted in weaker sales on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Denying that diversity had been reduced, the Booker foundation said the rule change was not created specifically to include US writers but to allow entries from authors of any nationality, regardless of geography.